"Foreign" Things

No paper products - unless you're having a party..... in which case they come in colored packs of six and are pricey.....you won't find a single paper plate, utensil, or cup on the napkin/paper towel isle......they just don't sell them! My horrible paper habit of 10 years has come to an abrupt halt and my dishwashing skills have instantaneously improved! :-)

No Cheddar Cheese - instead there is white cheese broken down into weird circular or worm-like shapes.....tastes like goat cheese or something you'd find on an exotic salad at a restaurant

Bland Food - Chilean cuisine is bland - no spice whatsoever - a friend of mine said......."Have you ever seen a Chilean restaurant in the States? I answered....."No". She then said....."There's a reason for that". You'd think this would help me trim down a bit - so far.....NOT A CHANCE! :/

Loaded Vehicle = air conditioning and front air bags if you're lucky...

MLS - What's that?.......instead we have 5 realtors working for us

Strays Everwhere - stray dogs......even stray HORSES! How bizarre is that? Have you ever read Dr. Seuss' Go Dogs, Go!? They are everywhere. Huge ones, small ones, cute ones, ugly ones,....dogs, dogs, dogs. Haven't seen any with hats though (Dr. Seuss humor). I used to be afraid of dogs......not so much anymore. These dogs are, for the most part, so docile. Very Foreign! The horses that we keep seeing (2 in particular) roam the streets and hillside near the kids' school, NIDO de Aguilas. They're gorgeous!

Jugglers/Cheerleaders - It's not uncommon to pull up to a stoplight to see a 6 yr. old child in front of the cars juggling tennis balls or whatever they can get their hands on. When the light is about to change, the juggler walks through the cars hoping for a few pesos before heading to the other side of cars who have a red light. Groups of cheerleaders being tossed in the air are often seen as well.

Street Grocers - Who needs a grocery store? You can pick up breads, crackers, fresh fruit, water bottles, ice cream, flowers, etc. - all while waiting for a stoplight to turn green. It's the BEST!

Car Watchers - It's common to see a gentleman standing in a parking lot pointing to where you should park and supposedly "watching" your car while you are away from it. When you return, he's still there and will help you back out (even if there's not a thing behind you). All for a few pesos.

Gas Station Etiquette 101 - This is a course I'm still learning.....I haven't figured this all out just yet, but who would ever choose "Self Serve"? Gas attendants pump your gas, wash your windows, check/change your oil if you choose, put air in your tires, etc. Again.....all for a few extra pesos. The dollar may not always be strong here.....but your pesos go a long way!

School

Well, my first week of the school was better than i thought it would be :) The weirdest thing is that there are so many different nationalities ! You can so many different languages in the hallway. Like, turkish, hebrew, german, italian, hindi, chinese, japenese, korean, portugese, spanish. Well, most people speak at least english and spanish! My spanish class is so hard though. ! First, there are on unit 5 and i am still on unit one and my teacher just expects me to know everyhting and second, spanish 3 in the united states is compared to spanish 1 here. it is so hard. Ihave surpassed all of my friends in texas ! We only have 4 classes a day and they are each a hour and a half! That was a hard adjustment. But, the great thing is that the passing periods are each 20 minutes. it's so nice ! One of the bad things is that most of the curriculum that i am learning in some of my classes i have already learned! Like in english, i have already read the book that we are studying, and in science i have done the labs they are doing. :/ oh well. Seminary starts tomorrow :/ yikes! at least it is in english. They have a seminary class for all of the gringos in my ward haha. I started basketball also ! I made varsity! actually you don't have to try out you are already on the team but still. We had to run the mile yesterday in under 7 minutes and 45 seconds. Only 4 people made it. Two seniors and two freshman. The one thing you do have to try out for is the sac tournament. It is a tounament where you go to a different country in south america. This year basketball is going to Uruguay. I want to go so bad. I can't wait for it. Well, i will post another time !

Lindsay

Correct Words

Luke, getting ready for church: Oops. I tooted . . . it's good I didn't say the F-word.

I must agree. F-words are F-requently F-rowned upon in our F-amily.

Languages

Conversation during dinner in the hotel, after the second day of school. . .

The kids were talking about how many different cultures are represented at their new school. Carley had complained yesterday that she's the only one at her small-group table in Spanish class that isn't Korean or Chinese, so not only does she not understand the teacher, who refuses to speak any English, but she doesn't understand the small-group chatter in Chinese. Lindsay and Peter mentioned the many polyglot students with whom they have classes. Carley mentioned there are a couple of girls in one of her classes that speak Hindi.

Tonight, the conversation was somewhat similar. Then this . . .

Lindsay chimed in: There's this kid in one of my classes from Turkey. He was speaking Turkish to me.

Luke: Like this, "Bock, bock bock, bock, bock bock."

I'm still looking for my Turkish dictionary for the translation. Bock, bock.

Uneventfullness

You know what? Imma just put it all on here. What's the difference? lol Here ya go.

Well.....the past few days have been rather uneventful. Sort of. Mostly just looking at more and more houses. We're narrowing it down though. I usually stay home, though. Well, if you can call this my home. The hotel, I mean. We had a school orientation on Wednesday. We played some games and got a tour around the school. I met some people in my grade. They seem pretty nice. I can't wait to start school. This morning, I had another orientation for school, but today it was outside. We played some field games in six different groups, then we joined all together and played capture the flag. I made the winning (and only) point. lol It was a lot of fun. I got invited to go a couple of places, but I just didn't feel like it. Idk. I'm really tired. I came home and fell asleep. Another day, though, I'll have to take up one of those offers.
One of my favorite things here is the yogurt. It's SO good! Here's a list of stuff I miss:
Milk that tastes like, well, milk! lol Having people close to hang out with. School. Being situated in a house. Having a stable, organized life. Not having to worry about going out because someone might try to talk to you in a language you don't know. Not being stared at. Not having friends that are there to help me out. And Milky Ways. haha

Casando

So the hunt continues. One of the more difficult things about finding a house is . . . finding people with keys so you can see it. For example, there's one we really, really, really want to see, but the owners are on vacation until the end of the month. They real estate people don't have a key. So we were told we were out of luck, at least until the end of the month. There also seem to be several of the real estate type of people on extended vacations. February doesn't seem to be, perhaps, the best time to move here.
On another note, you can click on that little slide show thingy on the right hand side of the blog and it's supposed to open the slide show so you can see a large version of all the pictures. I keep adding a few more occasionally. I just got emailed some of the luggage trains from our departure from San Antonio and put them up. People laughed and seemed to mock us a bit, but deep down I know they were just jealous of our genius.
Another day's coming . . . I can just see the sky beginning to show hints of light over the Andes.

Umm......

The following is an excerpt from last week from my own blog, which you can access at www.beyondtheequator.blogspot.com if your interested. I will continue to post excerpts on this blog, but the "full version" is located on said website.

They took us straight to our hotel. It's pretty nice. We have 3 rooms. Lindsay and Carley share a bed in one room, same with los padres, then Hyrum and Luke share a bed in my room. i'm the only one who gets their own bed. But the boys are loud. Whatever. So much stuff is different, but it doesn't feel like I'm in a foreign country. Well, it does when someone tries to talk to me, but it doesn't when i'm alone. The outlets are all different. You have to have a power adapter for everything. My mom's hairdryer blew up this morning because of the different outlets. The light switches are different, and the toilet paper holder things are different too. It's weird.
So the first thing we did was go to the US Embassy to rent a car. The girls and I sat outside with Pepper and Sadie, the cat and dog, while dad went in. It's just a gated building. hmm...well, we got a minivan and went and dropped the pets off at this lady's house because the hotel doesn't allow pets. The house was very small. There are tons of stray dogs everywhere. Drivers are crazy. Motorcyclists will weave in and out of traffic and occasionally onto the sidewalks. Everybody honksand flips each other off. The roads are insanely crowded. There's this one street, where for the first half of the day, it's a one way one way, then the other half, it's a one way the other way. What happens at the moment it changes? Weird. lol Anyway, we drove around for a bit. We went to the grocery store. Money is so confusing. We had a bunch of empanadas for dinner. We went swimming too. The pool is on the top floor, the 17th. There's a beautiful view. I'm going to put pictures up on my myspace sooner or later. Today we went house hunting. Some of the houses we looked at were pretty nice. All of them have pools. Oh yeah, it's summer here. I'm on summer vacation. I don't start school for a couple weeks. haha I had to kiss my realtor on the cheek. It was weird. Evidently people in Chile talk Spanish the fastest and hardest to understand of any other Spanish speaking peoples. Great. It's so different from the Spanish you learn in school though. We went to a mall and ate at a resturaunt called Pasta Basta. I had raviolli. All the food is so different. I already miss American food. It's not gross, but it's so, foreign? idk It's just weird. I've been trying so many different things. After lunch we went back to the hotel. I slept. I do that a lot. lol We're three hours ahead of Texas. The speed limit signs are in kilometers, not miles. It's just a bunch of little things like that that make this place so confusing.
For dinner we went to an Argentine resturaunt called Don Carlos. My meal was about $10,000. In Chilean pesos, that is. lol My dad gave Linds, Carley and I some weird looking meat stuff to try. He wouldn't tell us what it was until we ate it. It was alright. Then he told us. Blood Sausages. No meat at all. Pretty much cooked blood. Nasty. We went to a park after dinner. There were a bunch of strays, including a big ol German Shepard. Then we came home. Tomorow is church. In Spanish. Great. Well, it's midnight, and church is early so imma go. Peace out.

Favorite Things

Rick
the weather, dulce de leche, driving like a maniac, big trees, great parks

Tiffany
NO TEXTING! - Ahhhhh. chilean soda, grocery store escalators, yogurt, fresh fruit, street jugglers, mountains, ward members, maid service at the Plaza el Bosque Hotel

Peter
yogurt, yogurt, crazy drivers, fruit

Lindsay
ward members, fruit, dulce de leche, 3-story mall

Carley
drinkable yogurt, church friends, breakfast at the hotel, funky art sculptures

Hyrum
yogurt, hotel pool and jacuzzi, hotel eggs, corner convenience store

Luke
playing mouse trap, playing with Hyrum, yogurt, swimming on the 17th floor, my marbles

Lindsay's Experience

well, when as you know we have moved to Santiago, Chile :) haa, it's actually better than i thought it would be. When I first arrived i absolutely hated it!!! My dad took us down to a park with the dog and the cat and he left us there while he walked to the embassy to take care some stuff. Imagine your first day in another country and your dad leaves you in the middle of it with two of your siblings and your tiny dog, who cannot defend you if you wanted her to, and your cat. This is probably one of the most scariest experiences I heve ever been through. The driving here is pretty crazy too and everyone honks!!! I really like the ward here , it's great. The youth is bigger than our old ward, and i have already made friends with most of them, and one of them is very persistant that peter, carley, and I go to Fantasilandia with them! I don't really understand anyone yet, i am learning more and more words everyday though. This week we are probably going to go house hunting and on wednesday i might go horseback riding with the young women! Friday, we might have a movie/swim day also! Well i miss each one of you!
Love,
Lindsay

Bad Dreams?

So Tiffany woke up this morning after a restless night filled with strange, bad dreams. Luckily she quickly realized that it was all a bad dream . . . and she's back in reality, having left the comfort of her home and friends, living in a hotel with five children in a foreign country with bizarre customs where she neither speaks or understands the language, trying to find a house to accommodate the family without the assistance of a centralized MLS system, and concerned about the cost of everything with the added stress of a brand new monetary system with which she is unfamiliar.

Whew! Lucky those dreams last night were just dreams. :-)

The Eagle's Nest

Monday morning we began by reporting to the International School Nido de Aguilas. It's the school where, if all goes as planned, all five of the children will attend. We turned in a bunch of paperwork and had a tour of the campus. There are several seperate buildings, including an elementary, middle and high schools. The kids all seemed to like it.
We then spent a couple of hours looking at a few more houses. A couple were rather nice; and a couple were not so appealing. I spent a good part of the afternoon at the Embassy doing inprocessing, after I had dropped the older kids off at the May's house. Sara May is Lindsay's age and they go to church with us.
The rest of us joined them a bit later for a little swim in the pool, grilled steaks and burgers, and a wonderful family night. We all had a really good time.
Tuesday we didn't venture out too much, at least for houses. In the early afternoon, I took Peter, Lindsay, Carley and Hyrum on the subway and then walked to the May's again. The older three kids spent the afternoon hanging out at a mall and saw a movie. They seemed to have a good time. After dropping them off, Hyrum and I returned to the hotel via subway. It was pretty warm out.
I spent another lovely afternoon at the Embassy while Tiffany put her courage to the test and ventured out to a little park with Hyrum and Luke. They only got lost once.
We all had dinner in our hotel room . . . leftovers and some corn we bought from a guy on the street.

First Weekend

So we spent Saturday, or at least a good portion of it, looking at some houses. It gave us an introductory view of the market. We hope to see more of the comprehensive view in the days to come. The kids actually enjoyed the trip, despite a few somewhat-less-than-intended detours.
We went out to eat at an Argentine restaurant for dinner with a couple and their baby who were on the plane down here with us. They are also in the Air Force and moving here for a couple of years as well. Dinner was okay; certainly not as "Argentine" as I expected.
On Sunday we got up and, being fast Sunday, skipped breakfast. We attended church at the ward where we will most likely end up. I think much to their surprise, everyone really enjoyed it. There were several of the youth who had already been communicating with Lindsay and Carley over Facebook who were extremely excited to meet them in person. I think everyone enjoyed the loving nature and feelings there were there.
We had dinner at the Jones' house. It was absolutely delicious . . . and reminiscent enough of "regular" food that we were all full of smiles for the evening.
Tomorrow the real work begins.